Let’s be real: I doubt many people are playing the Uncharted games for the gameplay. These titles are doing the bare minimum to meet AAA action-adventure standards with some technical flourishes here and there, but that’s about it. You get by the numbers cover shooting, by the numbers occasional easy stealth, by the numbers climbing, by the numbers (and by that I mean really small numbers) puzzle solving, etc. The appeal lies in the spectacle, the artistry, the technical excellence by the standards of the platforms they are on, experiencing what are essentially slightly interactive Hollywood adventure movies that manage to keep the player hooked with expert pacing and characters that are straddling the line between psychopathy and charm just right.

One might also argue that it’s more fun watching footage of these games than actually playing them. The best example of this is the car chase sequence in Uncharted 4, which looked amazing when I first watched it years before being able to play it, but once I got to actually experience it first hand, this was the moment when I dropped the difficulty down, because it was remarkably (and surprisingly) frustrating and irritating to play. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an astonishing technical achievement, but not one second of playing it was fun, at least in my opinion.